Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Students as a Group of Individuals, Not Just a Group

I wanted to share a post I read this morning on the Association of Teaching Artists blog. It really gets at the essence of the need for individualized, creative education reform.

AXIS MUNDI

Education Week reports on a new study that finds that "achievement gaps between students of different genders and racial, economic, and linguistic groups are large and persistent...even as they seem to be narrowing for K-12 students as a whole."

Also: An excerpt from How Do We Think about Our Craft? an essay by Maxine Greene published by Teachers College, Columbia University.

"Gradually becoming aware of all this, we are beginning to recognize that every young person must be encountered as a center of consciousness, even as he or she is understood to be a participant in an identifiable social world. Each one may be encountered as a being who is at once a distinctive individual and someone whose consciousness opens out to the common, an intersubjective world in which he or she is inextricably involved."